This Online Side Hustle Pays for My Rentals (And Could Fund Your First Deal)

12:49Cody Berman:Like, can you scale up to the, you know, 5 ,000, 10 ,000,$15 ,000 a month? Yes, but it is going to take time. I think just getting your first couple hundred dollars per month, like that's a great goal. Like if you can get to$500 per month and I have some real examples here of like how that could really kind of change your real estate journey and like start investing and some real case studies as well. If you could just get an extra 500 bucks per month, like that you don't have right now, in addition to whatever other money you're making, that could be life-changing. So I think like that's a great goal.

13:18Cody Berman:And then you can continue to grow and scale from there. I don't want people to, you know, stop listening to this episode and think, okay, you know, I'm going to$15 ,000 a month or bust, like start small, continue to iterate. And it's, it's, I like to think of each one of my digital products as like a little passive income machine. So as each one starts to kind of get a foothold in the Etsy algorithm or wherever you're selling, you know, this one might be making$200 a month. This one's making 50. This one's making 300. And over time, you have this little army of passive income monsters who are making you 5 ,000, 10 ,000, 15 ,000 plus dollars per month.

13:51Tony J. Robinson:Cody, I love that you're kind of setting realistic expectations both on the amount, but also the time that it takes to get there. But even to your point,$500 per month over 12 months is an extra six grand a year. So imagine if in addition to whatever you're saving for your first real estate deal, you could add on an additional six grand every year. How much acceleration does that give you to kind of build your portfolio? So it may seem like a small amount, but that's life changing money when you add it up over time.

14:19Cody Berman:Yeah. And I want to give people some homework. If you are driving, please don't do this. And if you're doing anything that involves you really paying attention, don't do this. But check out these Etsy shops. So I pulled up two that are real estate specific. One is called the Agent Site Shop. It is this group of, not this group, it's this couple. They're realtors. And they basically just decided to take all of the like templates that they had that they were using within their own community. I think there were brokers and like they had a team under them and put them on Etsy. These guys now have 63 ,000 sales average price point.

14:49Cody Berman:I'm just like ballparking like 20 bucks per sale. So these guys from assets that they already had, I've made like an extra$1.3 million. Like obviously this is a, this is a really great example of what could be possible. But imagine if you just took some of the things that you were already creating or already using. I'm sure we have realtors listening to this. I'm sure we have people who have real estate calculators listening to this. Imagine what that could do for you if you were to just turn that into a digital product for sale. Or there's another one here just to give you guys some ideas. It's called The Weekly Crew.

15:19Cody Berman:This is another Etsy shop. And again, please don't look this up if you're driving. But this shop has 126 ,000 sales. Average price points like 10 bucks per sale. These guys have made an extra 1.2 million selling spreadsheets for like, they have like an Airbnb income tracker. They have a rental income property tracker. They have like a yearly budget. They have all these different like spreadsheet type printables. So these are people who probably had these spreadsheets that they were using for personal use. And then they decided to then templatize them, sell them to other people. And they've made millions in the process.

15:51Cody Berman:So I just want to give people some like real life inspiration, like what this could mean. I'm assuming most of the people listening are probably pretty interested in real estate. These are some real life, real estate focused shops who have absolutely crushed it. And I know we are mentioning numbers, Tony, you mentioned like the extra 500. I like using a thousand dollars per month as a good benchmark. And it's just easy math on a podcast who likes doing public math, but an extra thousand dollars per month is just$33 per day. I love breaking things down into micro goals. $33 per day breaks down to eight,$4 products, four,$8 products, seven,$5 products, three,$11 products.

16:26Cody Berman:And once you start listing these things and actually have products for sale, like these numbers become so much more tangible. Like what could an extra, you know, thousand dollars per month,$12 ,000 per year, like$12 ,000 per year could be a 3.5 % down payment on your first house hack, depending on what market you live in. Like that's a significant amount of money from these silly little pieces of paper, these digital files that you could sell on a platform like Etsy. So like, even though these numbers might not sound as crazy as some flipper who comes on, they're like, you know, I made 150k hey, my first deal, like even an extra thousand dollars per month consistent can seriously change your financial future and give you a lot more money to start investing in deals.

17:03Ashley Kehr:Especially the more passive it is. It's almost like you're getting royalties. You write a book, your book sells, you get your royalty check. Unfortunately, mine and Tony's royalty checks are not this big as the digital products. But I just looked up someone I'd follow on Instagram for a long time, my wealth, a diary, I had remembered years ago, she created a personal finance tracker for like you're not worth. And she would share like how long it took her to like build this tracker and the spreadsheet or whatever. And then she put it on Etsy. And for a long time, it was our only Etsy product, but she would share how much she made.

17:39Ashley Kehr:And I just looked up and she's at 10 ,000 sales and only has nine products on there. That range from like$5 to like$25. dollars it looks like for her products. But like over time, you know, you just put it on there and then kind of set it and forget it. Yeah.

17:58Cody Berman:Yeah. It's huge. It can really add up.

18:01Ashley Kehr:So we have to take a quick break. But when we come back, Cody is going to walk us step by step through launching your first product from idea to listing to sale. We'll cover that right after word from today's show sponsors. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast, easy, just use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. That means you can stop struggling to get your job notice on other job sites. Indeed's sponsored job posts help you stand out and hire the right people quickly. Your job post jumps straight to the top of the page where your ideal candidates are looking.

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21:07Ashley Kehr:Okay, we're back with Cody and we just covered what a digital product is and how much you can make with them, but how much cash do you actually need to get started? So Cody, what kind of software do we need to buy? What are our fees for Etsy? What's the startup capital we need?

21:25Cody Berman:So the awesome thing about this side hustle is you need almost zero capital to get started. So the big price tag to start opening your own Etsy store. And again, the reason why they do this, They're very anti-AI and they don't want just bots flooding the platform. You're going to pay a whopping 15 bucks and upload a picture of your license, your identification to prove that you're a real human being. After that, you can pretty much ride on free tools if you want to go the frugal route. Like you can use the free version of Canva, which is$0 per month. You can use the free version of various keyword research tools.

21:58Cody Berman:One I like in particular is eRank. There's also Everbee, Insight Factory. There's a couple of good ones out there that are Etsy specific. there are paid versions if you want to go crazy and this is the cool thing about the etsy niche it's not like blogging or some of these other niches where the monthly fees on these platforms are egregious i know there's some keyword research tools in the blogosphere i've used before that are like 200 a month e-rank the pro version is 10 per month as we're recording this the pro version of canva is 12 per month those are what i use so if you want to get the like official cody toolkit you're looking at a whopping$22 per month in tech.

22:36Cody Berman:Canva Pro, E-Rank Pro. It's really that simple. You don't need many more tools than that. And you can get away going this crappy in free version, although you'll just have a little less access because the tools are a little worse with the free versions, as you'd expect.

22:51Tony J. Robinson:Cody, I just want to make sure I'm tracking. So you're saying with a roughly$40 investment between Etsy, E-Rank, and Canva, you could potentially create a side hustle that's producing four figures a month and net profit to you as the owner.

23:05Cody Berman:Yes, that sounds sensationalized. You will have to invest your time. That is going to be the biggest investment here. You can't just get the tools. Then all of a sudden the rain starts pouring down with the cash. But yes, that is in terms of capital. It's very capital unintensive. It is a little bit time intensive. You will spend time creating designs and we can talk about like using my template method and ways to shave that time down, but it is really not very capital intensive at all.

23:31Tony J. Robinson:I love that, right? Because that's, again, the challenge of real estate investing is that oftentimes it is capital intensive. So I'm glad we're going through this. So Cody, let's start at square one. They're listening. You've sold them on the idea of digital products as a side hustle to help them get their first deal. What is the very first thing that we should be doing?

23:47Cody Berman:So the first thing I like to do is just generate a massive list of ideas. Now, these could just be ideas from your head. You could use a thought partner like ChatGPT. I like using chat GPT to kind of think of product ideas, just, or just look around the room that you're in or things that you use, like go through your files and your computer, look around. Like I have wall art behind me. I have like a tracker on my desk. I have a planner on the desk over there. There's so many opportunities. If you just like literally look around the room that you're sitting in, or again, look at the files of your computer, what spreadsheets you're using.

24:16Cody Berman:Do you have a media kit? Do you have this? Do you have that? Just kind of look close to home. And then once you start to exhaust that list, start to think of other things. Like maybe you're really into meal planning and you're really into working out and maybe you can go down that niche or maybe you're really into real estate. You can see what types of real estate printables or digital products you want to create. Maybe you're really into faith based printables. Like there's so many different avenues you can explore. Then after that, you take that massive list of ideas. And I'm basically just I'm running you through the exact playbook, Tony, that I did for this like brand new shop that I started as an experiment, the thousand dollar per month experiment.

24:49Cody Berman:I just had a massive list of ideas. I'd then take those ideas.

24:52Tony J. Robinson:No, just I love the brainstorming is like the first step, Cody. You also mentioned using like chat GPT. Do you have like a good prompt that you found to work well to help with this ideation? Or is it really just like, hey, here's what I'm interested in. Help me come up with some ideas. How should we approach using some of those AI tools?

25:09Cody Berman:I guess it depends how much you know about what you want to create. You could say, hey, I'm really into fitness and meal planning. Like help me think of some fitness and meal planning digital products that I could create. Or you're like, I really want to create a meal planner. give me 15 different niche down variations of a meal planner. And it might be like, here's a keto one. Here's a paleo one. Here's like one for women. Here's one for men. Here's one if you want to gain weight. Here's one if you want to lose weight. And it can just kind of spit out all these different variations. Now, a lot of these ideas are going to be garbage.

25:35Cody Berman:So you need to plug these ideas into a keyword research tool like an e-rank or Everbee or Insight Factory. Basically take all the ideas that you thought of. Like I use this literally a Google sheet. Take all the ideas that you thought of or your thought partner, chat GPT or whatever you're using and start plugging them in. Like literally type in, you're like, okay, keto meal tracker. How many searches does this have per month? What does the competition look like? And a lot of these keyword research tools will make it easy. They'll be like, okay, if it's green, that means there's a lot of search volume.

26:03Cody Berman:If it's, if that's for a search volume, if it's red, that means there's not a lot of search volume. If it's green, that means there's not a lot of competition. If it's red, that means there's a lot of competition. They'll give you numbers, but it's like color coded, super easy. So I'll kind of go through all of these ideas that chat GPT spits out and be like, okay, what are the ones that have some decent search volume and not a lot of competition? And usually if I have a list of a hundred product ideas that gets whittled down to like 20 or 25 that I'm actually going to create. And then from there, I'll kind of bucket them into similar types.

26:35Cody Berman:So let's just, I don't know why I'm, I'm a big, I've been big into like meal tracking and fitness tracking lately. I've been like really into my fitness pal and like trying to bulk up and stuff. So that's top of mind. And so let's just use that as an example. Let's say you're like, okay, I wanna go down this like meal planning route. So from there, I'd like bucket the different types of printables. So I'm like, okay, I wanna create a meal planner and I wanna create like 15 different variations of this meal planner. I know I gave some examples before. So then what I would do is I would go into Canva, I'd create like my base template for my meal planner.

27:06Cody Berman:And what that would be is just like, okay, like meals tracked, here's like the calories, here's the macros, all that fun stuff. Like maybe the days of the week. I would, before I even go in actually and create this, I would go on Etsy. I would type in the product that I'm going to create, which is Keto Meal Tracker, and just see what comes up. And you can, don't copy the bestsellers, but just use the bestsellers in your knowledge base. Like don't be making something that's so far outside of what, like obviously it's a bestseller. People are buying it. That's for good reason. So use that as kind of your North Star.

27:34Cody Berman:Like, okay, I want to have similar qualities to this. How can I make mine a little bit better or stand out a little bit better? Or like maybe the design is a little bit better. then I'll go into Canva I'll actually create the product I'll create the base template and then once I have a base template that I'm really happy with the base template is actually the part that takes me the longest like I'll spend a couple of hours creating like a really solid base template for something once I have that that's when I go crazy creating different variations so this is what I like to call the template method so once I have like a perfect meal tracker base template then I can just go and make the keto version the paleo version the carnivore version.

28:10Cody Berman:Like I can just spit out dozens of variations of this product in a very short amount of time. It might just be changing a couple of words and the colors. And, you know, let's use another example, like that's outside of like meal tracking. Let's say we want to create an invitation to some type of party. Like you could very easily have like some Christmas invitation and turn that into a Halloween and turn that into a Thanksgiving and turn that into a birthday and turn that into a graduation and turn that into a mother's day, father's day. Like You can just basically throw every holiday, every niche, every trend that you can possibly think of as long as the search volume supports it on top of this base template that you've created.

28:45Cody Berman:So that's kind of the process for the creation part.

28:48Ashley Kehr:Is that what you would call like the stacking method though? Is to like using, taking one product and then kind of using it to create other products based off that as like a template?

28:59Cody Berman:That's exactly what I mean. Yeah. So I always, I'm never just like creating one product, spending a couple hours creating one product. And I'm like, yep, that's it. I'm not creating any other variations of that product. I'm always creating like the most basic, I like to call it a base template version of the product and then seeing how many niches that I can kind of get that product into because the riches are in the niches on Etsy. If you're just creating a generic meal tracker or a generic birthday invite, you're competing with everyone and their mother who has an Etsy shop. But the more you niche down, the less competition there's going to be and the more in line with the buyer's search your product is going to be, which leads to a higher conversion rate.

29:37Cody Berman:So yeah, there's a lot of reasons to niche down, but that's exactly what I mean, Ashley. It's like taking one base template and just stacking it into as many different niches as humanly possible.

29:46Ashley Kehr:Let me give an example real quick. Okay. So one of the products I had was a tenant handbook, which was basically you put together a guide, which tells you where the water shut off is, how they pay their rent, what the address is, what the schools, local schools are, they can enroll in things like that. And then it's like eight pages long with different stuff. So as an example, how would you niche that down? So would it be like a duplex tenant handbook, a single family home tenant handbook where like maybe you could like change the duplex one as to like, here's our rules. Here's how we respect the common areas or things like that.

30:21Ashley Kehr:What are some examples of real estate as to like how you could niche down on digital products?

30:27Cody Berman:This question is exactly why keyword research and SEO is so important. Like, I don't know off the top of my head. That's the honest answer. I don't know. But if you type that into the Etsy search bar or you type that into one of these keyword research tools, you might see that like a ton of people are typing in like the house hack version or the duplex version or the Airbnb version. Like you just don't know until you go and do the research. And I think honestly, that's one of the biggest mistakes that new sellers make is they just like create stuff willy nilly without looking. And, you know, they, they do get the master list, but they just like go through and create everything.

30:58Cody Berman:I create the master list, plug it into a keyword research tool, figure out 80 % of them are junk. And then I go and actually create the ones with search demand. So like I off the top of my head, actually, I have no idea. But like if we were to actually go and do this and type in, type that into the Etsy search bar or into a keyword research tool, we'd very quickly see what people are searching for. And then we could create the products accordingly.

31:18Ashley Kehr:That's an even better answer because anyone looking to do any kind of a digital product just got the answer.

31:23Tony J. Robinson:Exactly. Cody, how often are you buying the, you know, quote unquote, competitors product to better understand what the actual deliverable is? Like, is that part of your process? Or is it just based on their their Etsy sellers page that you're kind of gathering this information?

31:37Cody Berman:I used to do a little bit of competitive research where I'd buy other people's products. But at this point, I kind of know exactly how it's getting packaged and what they're doing. Like, the only time I've done the research to see how people are delivering things is for like a massive shop. Sometimes people will deliver a PDF, like a really nice branded PDF and it'll have like a link to their shop. And it might have like a freebie that they're giving away to get people on their email list. And this is kind of like next level Etsy. So we can get into this if you want, but it's definitely not necessary for like a beginner, but you don't need to go and buy the competitor stuff.

32:08Cody Berman:You can kind of see what the product looks like. You know that it's, you know, if it's a tracker, it's probably getting delivered as a PDF. But if it is a link, if you're curious, like for example, if you were to buy a spreadsheet from me, Tony, you buy it on Etsy. Like Etsy doesn't just email you the spreadsheet link. Like I would, a PDF would get delivered to you. It would probably have a big button on it, like download spreadsheet or whatever. And you create a copy, it would go into your Google Sheets. But a lot of times like those PDFs are like nice and branded. So I've done some competitive research with that.

32:36Cody Berman:But for just a regular old, like downloadable PDF type of thing, I'm not going and downloading. I kind of know what the customers are getting.

32:43Tony J. Robinson:So it sounds like step one is the idea generation, you know, either using your own brainstorming or some of the AI tools, then doing the keyword research, which you mentioned. And what was the name of the service you mentioned? It was eRank as a way to do some of the competitive research. Then it's actually creating the product, Canvas, your tool of choice. So once the product is actually ready and you're like, okay, I feel good. I've done my research. It looks great. What are the following steps?

33:12Cody Berman:So once you have your product created, then you list it to your Etsy shop, which includes a title for your product. So making sure going back to the keyboard research that you have like the most optimal keywords in the title, like making sure that it's exactly what people are searching for. You upload your listing images. So this is your images to kind of showcase what the product's all about. So if this is a Airbnb income tracking spreadsheet, like you might want to show some of the features and like be like, okay, here's like, this is this tab. This is this tab. You can use up to 20 listing images to kind of describe your product.

33:41Cody Berman:Then you have a description where you kind of write down all the things like, you know, this is how the product is delivered. If you have multiple sizes, like, you know, this is delivered in letter A4, A5 size. You can also add just basically anything you want in the description that'll help the buyer understand what they're getting. And then the last important thing is the tags and the tags are basically just ways to identify your product. So if you were selling like an Airbnb income tracking spreadsheet, you might be like, you know, real estate, you know, Airbnb spreadsheet, like income tracking.

34:09Cody Berman:And like all these, you have 13 unique tags that you can use to identify your product. Once you have all that filled in for your product, you hit publish, it sits in your Etsy shop. And when someone purchases that product, it gets automatically delivered to them. Like nothing, you don't need to click send. You don't have to send them an email. You don't get a notification. It's like, now you have to email this file out. No, it gets automatically uploaded to the person's Etsy account once they purchase on Etsy. So that's the beauty of this whole side hustle. I know you mentioned at the beginning, like why digital products versus other things.

34:38Cody Berman:It's because I could have a thousand people buy my products and I basically have no work. I like to say it's 95 % passive because I've done the stat analysis on this. I get about one in 20 customers messaging me who are like, hey, I don't know how to download this or like they have some clarifying question. And for most of those, I have just like, they're called auto replies or like saved replies. Just like a canned response, I click one button, ship it off and all of a sudden they have no trouble downloading the file. So like it is a pretty passive side hustle once you get the products up and listed in your shop.

35:11Tony J. Robinson:Cody, what about actually marketing? Are you doing any additional marketing to drive traffic back to those products? Like, are you going into the comments and forms and trying to redirect people back that way? Are you running paid ads on Etsy? Or is it just truly organic traffic from the platform, all the SEO and the research you've done that's driving eyeballs back to the actual listing?

35:32Cody Berman:So I'll answer this question in two ways. If you are a more advanced person, like once you get to the level that I'm at, you can use other strategies. You can start promoting on social media. Like Pinterest is a great tool. You can create an email list where you're like getting, you're having people download some kind of freebie on like the PDF deliverable. Like there's a lot of fancy stuff that you can do, but for someone just getting started, and this is exactly what I did with that new shop that I scaled from zero to a thousand dollars in 116 days, thousand dollars per month, I should say in 116 days, you do not need an email list.

36:01Cody Berman:You don't need an audience. You don't need anything like that. All you need to understand is keyword research and SEO. And I know I've been throwing those terms around. Let me just define them real quick. Cause they can sound like jargon. That doesn't mean anything. It's just, it sounds like, you know, nerd speak. Basically what keyword research is, is understanding what people are typing into the search bar of Etsy, of Google, of whatever, whatever platform, YouTube, and delivering the thing that they're looking for. So if someone is typing in, you know, keto meal tracker onto the Etsy search bar, like your job as a keyword researcher is to create the exact thing that they're looking for.

36:35Cody Berman:That is keyword research in a nutshell. It is just, it's literally researching the keys that people are typing into their keyboard on the search bar. Like I know it can sound fancy and jargony, but that's pretty much it. So hopefully that answered your question a little bit, Tony, but yeah, that's, that's kind of all you need to understand to start making sales with this. Like that's the cool thing too, is you, you don't need 10 ,000 followers on Instagram. You don't need a big YouTube channel. You don't need any of this stuff because Etsy is a platform. Like Etsy inherently doesn't sell stuff.

37:03Cody Berman:They're just a platform. So they make money when you make money, They take 6.5 % of digital product sales, which they raised from like four to 6.5 a couple of years ago when everyone was up in arms. But I think it's a great thing because I don't know if you guys watched the Superbowl last year. There was a big Etsy ad. There was a big Etsy ad two years ago in the Superbowl. Like they are spending so much money. I see Etsy ads on the gym TV screens when I'm at the gym. They're spending so much money getting people onto the platform. And that's exactly what they're using those dollars for. So like I am more than happy to pay Etsy, you know, 65 cents to deliver my$10 product to someone that never would have known about me.

37:38Cody Berman:They don't have to follow me on social media. They don't have to know anything about me. They just have to be typing something into the search bar that I was clever enough to create and then list and have it looking good enough for them to be interested in buying it. So that is the kind of the reason I like Etsy over other platforms, like a Shopify or selling on your own website. Those are great. If you have an audience, like if you guys were to start like a real estate specific shop, you could have an Etsy shop and you could have like a separate Shopify store. But like Shopify isn't going to drive traffic to your shop.

38:07Cody Berman:Etsy is. So that's why I'm such a huge fan of Etsy. Like they have 100 million buyers just waiting on the platform to buy your stuff.

38:13Ashley Kehr:I think this is so comparable to Airbnb. I have two Airbnbs listed on there. I don't have to do any kind of marketing, any kind of advertising. They take care of that for me. I pay them a percentage. Now a way higher percentage than I was.

38:29Cody Berman:A little higher than Etsy.

38:32Ashley Kehr:But the same concept, I think, very comparable. And it seems to be working for both the end user, the provider, and also the platforms themselves.

38:43Tony J. Robinson:So, Cody, you've mentioned this challenge that you did to, like, relaunch a new Etsy shop. First, what was the genesis of that? And did you learn anything new as you were going through this process, you know, in 2025 that maybe wasn't a lesson you learned when you started back in 2018?

39:00Cody Berman:So, this is a funny story. The reason I started this whole thing, I had a hater leave a comment on one of my videos and they were like, must've been easy for you starting in back in 2018. Like Etsy is so saturated now. You could never repeat this. I'm like, okay, bet. Like let's, let's put this to the test. So I started, uh, I'm like, I was kind of mad about it. Honestly, I was fuming for a couple of days and I was like, this guy, you know, I can still do it. I got the chops. So I started a brand new Etsy shop in a silo. Again, I didn't promote it anywhere. And the goal was to see how fast I could get to a thousand dollars per month.

39:32Cody Berman:I think that's a pretty meaningful number. We talked about like$12 ,000 per year. That's literally a down payment on a house hack. Like it's a pretty meaningful number. So I was like, okay, let's see how fast I can get to$1 ,000 per month. And I didn't want to basically dedicate my life to the shop. I want it to be realistic. So I was spending like five to 10 hours per week. As I mentioned before, it wasn't like I was just spending 80 hours a week on this brand new shop. And again, it went kind of slowly. It was like 185 bucks in month one. It was like 400 a month to 900 month three. And then month four took off and made over$4 ,000.

40:04Cody Berman:It was like between month three and four day one 16, where I hit that$1 ,000 per month milestone. But yeah, man, the Genesis was honestly a hater. And I was like, I'm going to prove this guy wrong. And I mean, it was, it was great for me just to have like, kind of go back through the things that I already knew kind of re not reteach myself, but just like re enforce that. Okay. I know what I'm doing. Like the things that I'm teaching, we have a whole like community and course and stuff is the stuff that we're teaching. Does it actually still work? Like I hadn't built a new shop from scratch since 2018.

40:35Cody Berman:And the answer was that it does. To answer the second part of your question, there was honestly not really any gotchas or like things that I didn't know. It's funny, like there's all this AI stuff and all these new tools coming out, but it's seriously just going back to the basics. It's just going back to like the keyword research and SEO stuff. And that is exactly what I focused on. It was just like relentlessly or ruthlessly like getting rid of crappy product ideas, creating the ones that worked. And I wouldn't want to say every single product worked because I had using the template method, I had listed like 350 products in four months, which might sound like a lot or a little depending, but it was because I was able to pump out, you know, six variations of one product in an hour or 10 variations of a product in an hour.

41:22Cody Berman:So it was like, it was very quick. So I was just like basically throwing as many product ideas as I possibly could, as long as they like passed all the checks. Like, okay, people are searching for this. There's not like a crazy amount of competition. And yeah, it was a slog. But after day 116, I crossed that$1 ,000 per month mark. And the shop has continued to chug along since.

41:42Tony J. Robinson:Let me ask one follow-up question because I'm sure this is what everyone's going to ask in the comments anyway. If you were to do that again, what niche and product would you start with and why?

41:51Cody Berman:If I were to start right now, Tony, we're recording this the end of October, 2025, I would go crazy in the Christmas niche. The holidays are insane on Etsy. Like some Etsy sellers make 40 % of their income for the year, especially in the handmade space on Etsy. So I would, I don't have a specific product in mind. I'd have to go and do the keyword research, but it would definitely, I just go crazy with Christmas digital products. Honestly, I would just create as many as humanly possible in like the next month throughout the entire month of November. And then I'd probably have a pretty big December.

42:23Cody Berman:And I bet I could get to the$1 ,000 per month milestone even faster.

42:26Tony J. Robinson:All right, coming up next, we're going to talk about how to scale. We talked about how to get started, but how do you scale beyond that$1 ,000 per month? We'll be right back with Cody after this. People love to call real estate passive income, which is interesting because most of the investors I know are very busy. Busy finding deals, busy managing teams, busy worrying they picked the wrong market. Rent to retirement flips that model. They help investors buy turnkey new construction homes, often 10 % below market value in top rental markets across the country. Their local teams handle the build, the property management, and the details so you don't have to.

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43:20Ashley Kehr:When you buy your first rental property, there's usually a moment right before you pull the trigger where your brain starts spiraling a little. What if I'm making a mistake? What if I can't figure this out? What if this whole thing becomes way more complicated than I expected? Honestly, building any business feels like that at first. And for a lot of investors, that next step is creating a brand, a website, or even a business around what they're building. And I've learned this myself. Whether it's real estate, building a brand, launching a side business, or creating something online, the hardest part is usually just getting started before you feel fully ready.

43:56Ashley Kehr:As a consumer, I use Shopify-powered stores all the time. Chances are you do too. Some of the brands I buy from regularly run on Shopify, and you probably wouldn't even know it because everything just works. The checkout is smooth, the experience is easy, and that's exactly what you want if you're building a business and trying to earn customers' trust. That's why Shopify makes so much sense. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10 % of all e-commerce in the U.S. From brands just getting started to household names, you can build a professional online store with ready-to-use templates that actually look good, even if you're not tech savvy.

44:35Ashley Kehr:Shopify also has AI tools that help write product descriptions, page headlines, and even improve product photography. And instead of juggling five different platforms, Shopify puts everything in one place from payments to inventory to analytics. Plus Shopify helps you market your business with easy email and social media campaigns. So you can actually reach customers. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash rookie. Go to shopify.com slash rookie. That's shopify.com slash rookie.

45:12Tony J. Robinson:You know what changed the way I invest? Realizing that scaling rentals shouldn't mean creating more work for yourself. If you're trying to build that kind of system, Baseline is giving away$10 ,000 to help investors build rentals that run themselves. I own and manage dozens of properties. I travel a lot and I still work a W-2 job. And there was a point where I was checking multiple bank accounts, chasing rents, and updating spreadsheets just trying to stay organized. Even on vacation, I was constantly checking if rent came in. Now, everything runs through Baseline. It's BiggerPockets' official banking platform that automates my rental cash flow.

45:51Tony J. Robinson:Rents get deposited into dedicated property accounts, transactions get automatically categorized, and everything stays organized without me constantly managing it. That's the difference the right systems make.

46:02Cody Berman:You can finally step away mentally without feeling like something's going to fall apart.

46:07Tony J. Robinson:Now my rentals practically run in the background and yours could too. Deposit qualifying rental income into Baselain for a chance to win$10 ,000. If you think property management is expensive, try mismanaging a vacancy or an eviction or a maintenance issue that turns into a five-figure problem because no one caught it early. That's expensive. A good property manager isn't overhead. Their protection against small mistakes turning into big losses. And that matters more than ever in this economy. That's why I like Mind. Unlike other property managers, Mind manages your property like an investment.

46:44Tony J. Robinson:They obsessively measure the things that matter for your bottom line. Things like occupancy, delinquency, and net promoter score. And they have the results to prove it. Go to mind.co slash showme to see how Mind performs and get your first month free, which is much cheaper than learning the hard way. All right, we're back here with Cody and he's walked us through what digital products are, how much we can make, the step-by-step process we're getting set up. And I wanna get into the nitty gritty of how do we actually scale this thing once we've got a good foundation laid. So Cody, we talked about 100 bucks per month, $1 ,000 per month.

47:17Tony J. Robinson:What are the levers that someone can pull to really scale this up exponentially beyond that first kind of four-figure threshold?

47:25Cody Berman:This is where we start getting into the more advanced stuff. So at this point, if you wanna get to$5 ,000, $10 ,000 per month, you probably want to start opening up some other traffic sources. Like I mentioned before, you can totally get to$1 ,000 per month, just strictly keyword research and SEO, no social media presence, no Pinterest, no ads, nothing like that. But once you want to scale, you might want to, again, open up some, open the floodgates as you will. So you probably want to start building an email list of some sort. So you could pick whatever email platform you'd like, start building an email list.

47:57Cody Berman:An easy way to do this is like when you deliver a PDF to someone, you could have like some kind of freebie or some kind of download. Like maybe, you know, someone's downloading your Airbnb income tracker and you're like, Hey, you like my Airbnb income tracker. I also have this like personal finance tracker. You might be, you might give that away for free to someone who like buys your products. It's just, it's goodwill. And you can then get them on your email list. They trade their email, they get your personal income tracker or whatever, your personal finance spreadsheet. And then you have them on your email list.

48:24Cody Berman:Now, you know that this person is the exact type of person who is like primed to buy your stuff. Like they already bought your Airbnb income tracker. So when you buy like the ultimate Airbnb listing guide and you, then you can pump it out to your email list. And chances are that the people on your email list are going to be pretty interested in that thing because they, again, they're the exact avatar that's buying the stuff anyway. So that's probably one lever that I would definitely take full advantage of is build that email list. Um, and like my main business, gold city ventures email is like our number one traffic source.

48:55Cody Berman:And it's something that we focus a lot on. So email list. Second would probably be Pinterest. Pinterest and Etsy, we like to say, goes together like peanut butter and jelly. The types of people who are on Pinterest typing in these things, like they might type in income tracker, or they might type in Airbnb income tracker, or they might type in meal tracker, using a lot of the examples we've talked about today. And they might type that in the Pinterest looking for one. And then they click through from Pinterest, brings them to Etsy and boom, they're in your shop. So Pinterest is another great one.

49:23Cody Berman:And just like the crossover between Pinterest users and Etsy users is huge. I don't have exact data on that because they haven't released it, but it's a, there's a pretty good swath that use both. Next would probably be probably ads. Like I don't want people to start thinking or to think that they have to start using ads right away because I don't want people to, yeah, I don't want people to think that they have to spend money to make money. But once you reach a certain threshold and you have products that are actually performing, you can then start to, you know, turn up the ad dials a little bit.

49:50Cody Berman:So you could, you could run ads on Etsy platform itself. You could run ads on Pinterest to get traffic to your Etsy store. But please, please, please only run ads on like once you start having some traction. The biggest mistake I see is people will be like, well, I could get to$1 ,000 per month. I could just run a ton of ads. It's like, well, ads only buy eyeballs. Ads don't buy sales. So if you have 100 people who saw your product and didn't buy it, and then you buy 1 ,000 eyeballs to look at that same product, chances are you're not going to make any more sales. But if you have a product where 100 people saw it and four people bought it, you have like a 4 % conversion rate, then you buy a thousand eyeballs.

50:24Cody Berman:Now you might make 40 sales from it. So like, just please understand the numbers and don't think that you're going to magically going to start making sales by running ads. But once you have some proof in the pudding, you can kind of use ads to juice the traffic to your shop. Next would probably be social media of other types. Like you could create a Facebook page about people who are passionate about tracking their Airbnb income with real estate, or you could create an Instagram page, or you could create a tick tock or, you know, pick your poison, whatever social media you like, like, don't, this is what I'll say too.

50:54Cody Berman:Don't think you have to do all these things. Like you don't have to do all the things, like just do the things that you have the least resistance towards, because then you're, you know, friction. If there's too much friction, then you're not going to do it. I'm a big believer in like taking small steps every day rather than like, okay, I mean, I'm finally going to like put on my shoes and go for that run. Like you just have to, it's the consistent, small daily actions that produce results. It's not just like one big heroic effort. So the less friction that you can have in this side hustle in general, the better.

51:26Cody Berman:So if you're like, well, I don't want to post on social media, then don't. If you don't want to create a Pinterest account, then don't. You don't have to do these things to be successful. But I'm just answering your question, Tony, about how do you maximize the juice? How do you get the most squeeze out of this juice?

51:39Tony J. Robinson:And Cody, that was like a phenomenal breakdown, man. I mean, you gave a lot of super tactical things. I think one one additional question that comes to mind for me is, is it common for sellers on Etsy of either digital or physical products to offer additional like services or coaching on the back end, like, like the example you gave of, of like a keto planner, if I'm someone who is maybe a trainer in my day job, and I sell this digital product of a keto meal planner, can I then reach out to those people for maybe like virtual fitness coaching? Like, Is that something that you see on that platform of like reaching back out to those buyers for actual services that you can offer to them?

52:17Cody Berman:I'm talking to a businessman here. Okay. Yes. People do do that. And so that is a, that is a really good point. And another great point about Etsy since Etsy is a marketplace where you don't need an audience. You don't need an email list, any of that stuff. It is a free lead generator. Like you pay to get people into your orbit with Facebook ads. You pay to get people into your orbit with Google ads, with YouTube ads, with any other ads there are out there on Etsy, you could sell people a little$5 printable. And then if you have a coaching business on the backend, you know, you got them on their email list, you warm them up, you start to like, maybe you bring them into your webinar, whatever your business model might look like.

52:55Cody Berman:These are free leads who are already interested in the things that you have to sell. So we're going back to the Airbnb income calculator example. Like if you have someone who downloaded that for, you know, they paid 10 bucks to get access to your spreadsheet, you think they're going to be interested in like a real estate course or community? Heck yeah. A lot more than like the average Joe or Jane off the street. So that's a great question, Tony. And that's like kind of next level Etsy businesses. If you do build the business on the backend, Etsy is a fantastic lead generator. Now I wouldn't be like, okay, you know, you bought this$5 thing and then there's like a direct upsell on Etsy to like my thousand dollar coaching program.

53:30Cody Berman:But if you can get them into your orbit, onto your email list, following you on social, all those good things. Then later on, you can convert them on higher price point products and services.

53:38Ashley Kehr:Maybe Tony and I should do our own challenge. The first one to get to a$1 ,000 benchmark where we each do trade our own shop and put real estate stuff up.

53:48Tony J. Robinson:Asher, you're going down. Don't bring out the competitors.

53:53Ashley Kehr:So Cody, to wrap up here, if someone listening wants to start today, like Tony and I for our challenge, what's the one action that they should take immediately after this episode ends?

54:03Cody Berman:You could literally have an Etsy shop up and running within the next hour. If you were to stop listening, you know, again, if you're driving, don't do this. But if you're at home, if you have an hour, half an hour, like you might, again, be sitting on a product that you could then easily templatize, like kind of just white label it. Obviously, if you have an income tracker or like a net income tracker, delete your numbers out of there and then like templatize it. But like you might be sitting on a product that you could list literally within the next hour. And that's all it takes. I'm a huge fan, again, of momentum of the snowball effect.

54:34Cody Berman:Once you get that first product listed, then the second one becomes easier, the third one, the fourth, so on and so forth. So it's kind of the Nike thing. It's just do it. Get over that first hurdle. There's so many people I see who just sit on the sidelines forever, whether it's real estate or a side hustle. They have a 20-page business plan. They have a list in their notes of 100 different business ideas. And it's been there for four years and they've never taken an action. Like just take that first piece of action, go into Canva, create something for fun. If you don't have anything that you already are sitting on, like I mentioned, like the barrier to entry is so low with the side hustle.

55:06Cody Berman:And this side hustle is just, you know, a segue into so many other things. Like you never know what, you know, the keyword research knowledge that you might gain from doing the side hustle could teach you or the design skills, like the design skills could be, could translate into so many different things. You could use the skills that you learn from a digital products business to freelance to earn some like quick now money if you need some extra cash. It's just like kind of a masterclass in business. Like it's a little mini MBA, if you will, creating a digital product business. So yeah, please just like take that first step of action.

55:37Cody Berman:I see so many people who just have like these endless business plans and notes of all the things they're gonna do. But that first step is so elusive. But the first step is everything. And that's what leads to the second and the third and the hundredth step. So yeah, take that first one.

55:51Ashley Kehr:Well, Cody, thank you so much for joining us today. Can you let everyone know where they can reach out and find more information about what you're doing?

55:58Cody Berman:Yeah. So goldcityventures.com is the website where everything digital products. And if you want to follow me on social media and actually check out, for the$1 ,000 per month challenge, I recorded a video every day. It was a lot. It was grueling. I was pretty happy when I hit day 116 and actually reached the goal, but at Cody D. Berman everywhere. And you'll see that series and you can DM me, reach out. I love talking to people and talking shop. Thanks for having me, guys.

56:23Ashley Kehr:Yeah, thank you so much. This was a wealth of knowledge and me and Tony definitely have to do this challenge. So everybody makes you come to my Etsy shop to download a product and not Tony's. Well, Cody, thank you so much again. I'm Ashley, he's Tony, and we'll see you guys on the next episode of Real Estate Rookie.

56:46Tony J. Robinson:Hey, rookies. if you're watching this, we want you to apply to be a guest on the Real Estate Rookie Podcast. That's right. Ashley and I are looking for amazing stories just like yours to be a part of our Real Estate Rookie Podcast. Now look, you don't need to be an expert. You don't need to have done thousands of deals. Even if you've done one deal, your story could help inspire the next listener.

57:05Ashley Kehr:As a rookie investor, especially if you just got your first deal, it is all fresh in your minds and you are the best person to tell your story, give your experience on how you got it done to help someone else get their first deal.

57:18Tony J. Robinson:So head over to biggerpockets.com slash guest if you want to be a part of our show. Again, that's biggerpockets.com slash guest, and we'd love to have you on. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile, the message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just$15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.

58:12Thank you.